Steve Jobs Through the Years

“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs, at a Stanford University commencement ceremony in 2005.

Time and time again, Jobs lived up to these words. He was an innovator, a phenomenon of the personal computing revolution. Jobs was a driving force behind bringing the PC into the home, and became the man to shrink it down and make it portable.

A true purist at his core, Jobs endlessly strove for product perfection in order to deliver exactly what consumers wanted. And as he once famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

To try and understand what made Steve Jobs a visionary, Wired.com takes a look back at the life of Steve Jobs, the man.

Jobs was destined to be a tinkerer from the start. Shortly after his birth in 1955, he became the adopted son of Paul and Clara Jobs, the former a machinist by trade and the latter an accountant. He was a bright child, though excitable (one teacher had to “bribe” him with candy to regularly attend her grade school classes).

After the family moved to Palo Alto in his adolescence, Jobs enrolled in a high school electronics course. The course led to Jobs landing a summer gig at the Hewlett-Packard factory, and would eventually introduce him to a friend who would soon shape his computing future for years to come.

Steve Jobs first met the man who would become his longtime collaborator and business partner, Steve Wozniak, through a mutual friend in Jobs’ high school electronics class. Woz and Jobs soon became fast friends, and together began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club.

Eventually, Jobs took a stint as a technician for Atari, and worked with Wozniak on optimizing the circuit board for the game Breakout.

Woz eventually spun his work with HP into a full-time job. But when Woz found that the Homebrew hacker-types were more interested in his hardware computer designs than HP was, Jobs saw an opportunity.

Jobs and Woz founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, selling their own systems based on Woz’ designs to other computing geeks like themselves. “Steve was very fast-thinking and wanted to do things,” Wozniak once said. Jobs ”always wanted to be an important person,” according to Woz, and he “wanted to do it by having a company.”

"I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money," Jobs told Fortune.

Apple skyrocketed. In the four years between the company's inception in a garage to its 1980 IPO, Jobs went from virtual unknown to being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jobs' name soon became a symbol of the up-and-coming, technologically savvy entrepreneur. His face was everywhere Apple’s brand could be seen, from Apple’s own advertising to the cover of Time magazine.

But Jobs was a sometimes controversial leader. During the middle of Jobs’ tenure, it was rumored he gave preferential treatment to the Macintosh computer team — a product he considered one of his greatest creations — risking alienating other product teams at Apple.

Amid internal political struggles and high tension with board members, in 1985 Jobs was fired from the very company he helped create.

While the subsequent years would prove tumultuous for Steve’s professional career, his personal life seemed to thrive. After delivering a lecture to a class of Stanford MBAs, Jobs met Laurene Powell, the woman who would eventually become his wife.

“'I was in the parking lot [after the lecture], with the key in the car,” Jobs said. “I thought to myself, If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever since.''

Shortly after they were married, Powell was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Reed Paul, named after Jobs’ alma mater (Reed College, at which he only spent one full semester) and his father.

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,” Jobs has famously said of the time.

Jobs used that creative momentum to form NeXT Computer, which despite multiple subsequent failures, Apple eventually acquired. Jobs then became the de facto CEO of the company.

And so Jobs was able to return to Apple rejuvenated, re-inspired, and ready to “Think Different,” as their marketing campaign of the time professed. Although directed toward consumers, the full text of the campaign seemed to echo Jobs' personal beliefs, almost a toast to who Jobs was. It read:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Jobs even foreshadowed Apple’s future game-changing directional shift toward mobile computing in a statement to Fortune in 1996. “If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”

"My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be."

In 1998, Apple debuted the first iMac, a distinct departure from the "un-innovative beige boxes" of competitors, and the first in a string of innovative products that brought a degree of cool back to computing. Jobs also immediately canned a number of flailing projects such as the Newton and Cyberdog.

Instead, Jobs tasked the company to work on software, using NeXTSTEP to develop what would become Mac OS X. Jobs said, “We realized that almost all — maybe all — of future consumer electronics, the primary technology was going to be software. And we were pretty good at software.”

Jobs was endlessly dedicated to creating products that were not only functional; they were fun, sexy. Apple’s products are well designed, from the user interface, to the industrial design, down to every minuscule detail.

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Steve Jobs has made technology accessible to everyone, not just technophiles, nerds and developers. You don’t need to know how to program; you don’t have to install extra software or custom ROMs. The products just work, just as they should, straight out of the box.

When the iPhone was first announced on Jan. 7, 2007, and was finally available to consumers in June of that year, the world changed. Jobs ushered in the smartphone era for the masses.

“It’s taken the pain out of personal computing in so many different ways,” says Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of Cult of Mac (and a former Wired.com managing editor and news editor).

The iPhone, iPod and iPad are so intuitive, children as young as one or two use them easily, swiping to unlock, tapping open their favorite app, and playing a game or their favorite song. The user interface and experience is just straightforward.

And one more thing...

“This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done,” Steve Jobs said prior to the unveiling of Apple’s tablet, the iPad. He admitted to having worked on the device since the early 2000s, before they’d even thought of developing the iPhone.

The iPad may be one of Jobs’ greatest technical legacies, but it’s the transformation in the way we now think about interacting with data, and the way that we think about mobile computing, that is even more significant.

Jobs’ legacy is post-PC. We can now hold a fully functional computer in our hands, in our pocket, and use it for communication, learning, work, play or creation. Post-PC is what he was always working toward, what he hinted at when he said that Apple should work on “the next big thing” after the Mac when he jumped back on board with the company in 1996.

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us with the results,” Jobs said at Apple’s iPad 2 event. “And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.”

It is Jobs' appreciation for and understanding of the liberal arts and humanities that makes Apple devices stand out from the crowd. From the beginning, with the Macintosh 128K’s graphical user interface, mouse, word processor, and paint program, Jobs tried to bring computing to the mainstream, nontechnical crowd.

Steve Jobs announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer in 2004. He first found out about the tumor during a routine check-up in October 2003, and after discovering it was curable, tried nine months of alternative methods to treat the cancer. When that failed, he had surgery to remove the tumor, and sent out a company-wide memo, a portion of which is below.

"I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.''

In 2008, Bloomberg accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, which prompted Jobs to poke a little fun during Apple’s September event with a slide that read, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

But although his surgery was successful, Jobs was beginning to look ill. Jobs cited a hormone imbalance as the reason for his increasingly emaciated appearance. He ended up taking a five-month leave of absence in 2009 shortly after that announcement, saying, “During the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought."

Jobs took another medical leave of absence starting earlier this year. Both times he left, then-COO Tim Cook took charge of day-to-day operations of the company.

In August 2011, Steve Jobs officially stepped down as CEO of Apple and took the position of Chairman of the Board. He wrote to his company in a brief resignation letter:

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Steve Jobs was a singular leader and innovator. And we’ll continue to see his legacy live on in his products and the company he started in a Palo Alto garage over 30 years ago.